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He asks the question of Fortiss, but Fortiss only shakes his head.

“She won’t speak of that time, and I haven’t pressed her on it.

The servants I’ve queried mostly were in charge of dumping vats of healing salve over the side of the wall to help her injured wing.

They assumed she hunted at night, when no one could see her, but they couldn’t tell me how.

” He sighs. “Szonja and I still don’t know each other that well, barely longer than you and Marsh, Caleb. Do you know what he eats?”

Caleb makes a face. “I don’t, and it never occurred to me to ask. What about you and Wrath, Nazar? Did they have different protocols in the Imperium for interacting with your Divhs? Did you know him better?”

“I didn’t,” Nazar says, and from the heaviness in his tone, his regret is plain.

He looks around at us. “We’re all thinking the same thing except perhaps, you, Talia.

You had no preconceived notions of what it was to have a Divh, because you were never trained on what it is to have a Divh.

When Gent drew you into this world, then brought the flowers of this world to ours during the tournament, you took it as a wonder and a definite nuisance since you had to hide it from Rihad’s notice.

But you didn’t see it as a violation of some ancient protocol.

You didn’t know the protocol. You alone had the idea to travel through this plane, and here we are.

It took no more effort than simply to ask, and we never asked. ”

“It’s against Protectorate rule to ask,” Fortiss says. “The Divhs are our sacred warriors, meant only to do battle in times of great need, other than during the exhibition of the tournament and the incidental training when the band moved from father to son. That’s always been the way.”

“Except for the fact that Talia commands thirty of the things, and she’s not anyone’s son,” Caleb points out cheerfully.

“So, we already know that the way has twisted a bit over time. What else did they used to do at the dawn of the Protectorate that they no longer do? And why don’t we have this history?

I can’t tell you how many hours I spent poring over the books we had in the Second House libraries.

It all was the same, as if the ways our Divhs work with us today is exactly the same way they served and worked with us when the Protectorate was formed.

It never occurred to me to suspect otherwise. I’m an idiot.”

“Even the books that we managed to keep from Rihad’s purge of historical records told the same story,” Miriam says.

“Which means that Rihad wasn’t the first lord protector to cleanse our histories.

Any books or scrolls that came to us from other houses were undoubtedly recopied by each generation of leader.

The pieces that fit the story they preferred were preserved, and those that didn’t serve doubtless got scraped away. ”

“But it’s been here . Right here, all along.” Fortiss shakes his head. “Surely somebody made the attempt.”

“If they did, it wasn’t the Twelfth House.

Not ever,” Tennet says. “Our respect for the Divhs was too great. We were kept safe because marauders knew what we had—or believed they knew what we had. My father once told me that he’d summon Ayne whenever there seemed to be an uptick in marauder runs, which happened, in his telling, once every few years.

Ayne would tour the area, set a few fires, return to my father, and then return to its—his—plane.

At the time, I never knew when Ayne had been here, only that there’d been a fire in the mountains. ”

I make a face. “Merritt wanted to practice with Gent more, and Father certainly welcomed that. Gent wasn’t large but he was big enough, and we were lucky for the box canyons near our manor house that allowed them to practice unobserved.

I watched when I could, being careful not to be seen.

But it never occurred to me that there might be an ulterior motive to those practices, that my father also wanted the marauders or any travelers through the mountains to hear Gent, to imagine the destruction he caused, and to be afraid.

It worked, I think. And we were as guilty of such assumptions as anyone.

That day in the forest near the Shattered City, Merritt was convinced that a Divh had been in the area practicing for the Tournament of Gold, mostly because of all the trees that were knocked down.

I agreed with him, but whose Divh would that have been? ”

I gesture to Tennet, who’s watching me now with somber eyes that betray nothing. “Merritt thought it was someone from the Fifth House who snuck into the mountains to practice in hiding, and I simply accepted that. It never occurred to me to ask when I had the chance.”

“Don’t judge yourself too harshly,” Miriam says.

“It’s been five hundred years since the Divhs helped forge the Protectorate, and other than, I’m sure, some early interhouse warfare at the power of this nation’s birth, we’ve had peace.

Part of that peace was assured by a population that didn’t ask too many questions.

We’ve had wealth, we’ve had prosperity, and we’ve had precious little interaction with the Imperium.

Its wars have never been our wars, and other than for tithes in the past hundred years, delegations have been few and far between. ”

“It’s an arduous journey to travel from the heart of the Imperium to the Protectorate,” Nazar puts in.

“And the land itself was considered a savage wilderness. No one willingly wanted to travel here, unless they were part of a delegation of the Imperator, or they were driven to strike out on their own and trust the Light that they would survive the journey. There were no tales of wealth or prosperity, only wild-open spaces and hardship. To hear the opinions every household I passed on my journey to the Tenth House, that tale served both sides.”

“So, lies, you mean,” Caleb says, and Tennet grunts.

“And if these are the lies that we’ve accepted when we could have gone out and challenged them for ourselves…?” he asks. “What lies await us in our own history with the battle of the Western Realms?”

I grimace and join them in looking out across the wide lake, where Szonja and Ayne are circling the mirror coliseum—then further west, to the hazy blue horizon of the western borders of the plane of the Divhs. It’s only a trick of the light, but the blue seems deeper now, darker.

It’s time for us to go.

The Divhs respond immediately, and within a quarter hour, we’re lined up at the high promontory.

Caleb, Miriam, and I remain on the ground, while Nazar, Fortiss and Tennet are mounted.

Marsh is balancing on his toes, eager to roll, and even Gent is swaying slightly, his lips peeled back in a bright, eager grin.

Caleb grimaces. “I don’t know about this,” he mutters. “Marsh is nowhere near as big as Gent, and his wings are pretty much for show. I don’t know if he’ll make it in one giant jump.”

Gent huffs, an unconcerned rush of air, and Caleb chuckles. “Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but you’re just going to jump and what, we follow you?”

As he speaks, an image flashes in my mind, so wrong-feeling I take a step back. “No,” I say aloud, and Caleb and Miriam turn to me. Gent pushes the image again, and Caleb frowns at me.

“What do you mean, no? How do we do this then?”

I grimace, but if Gent thinks we can do it his way…“Do you trust me?”

“Not even remotely, but sure?—”

“Then hook into your Divh.” I turned away from him as Marsh kneels down, boosting Caleb to his chest and sliding him into his harness. When I turn back, Caleb is squinting into the sky.

“Um…is that a storm brewing out there?”

“I don’t know—but it doesn’t look good.”

I’m swamped again with the unmistakable certainty that our time is running out.

I nod to Gent, who throws his head back with a mighty roar, his arms stretching wide as he draws in a huge, gusting breath.

He whirls in one motion, clamping his enormous hands on either side of Marsh’s torso.

He picks up the Divh as if he isn’t nearly half his size but no bigger than a bucket of water, and with a second roar, he flings him out over the great lake.

“Go!” I shout in my mind, and the winged Divhs take flight.

A moment later the wind is completely knocked out of me as Gent snatches both me and Miriam up in a single great paw, somehow managing to clamp his fingers around us without crushing us.

As it is, Miriam is curled into a tight ball beneath me, cradled in the base of Gent’s palm, while I am hanging on for dear life to his topmost finger, my head barely clearing the ridge of his leathery finger, the tip of one claw curled around to rest too close to my head for comfort.

But at least I can see, which is both a blessing and a curse as Gent turns and jogs five great strides deeper down the slope, then turns around with another huff of excitement. He doesn’t roar but instead draws in a deep breath…then takes off running.

After a few short hops, he settles into massive ground-eating strides.

Everything is a blur at that point as he wrenches his fist away from his chest and recruits his own arms to help him amass speed, Miriam and I trapped in his palm as he pumps his great arms with vicious force.

My only sense of what’s happening is the pounding of his massive feet against the grassy incline.

I count one-two-three-four, and then I’m thrown back with a sickening lurch as we catapult out over the lake.

Gent’s fingers have loosened their hold enough that I can see a shock of open water beneath us, then sky, then water, then sky?—

Then blackness surrounds us, and all breath is ripped from my lungs.